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MADISON COUNTY, Ind. -- Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill asked a U.S. court Tuesday to reinstate the death sentence for a man who killed a young mother and her 4-year-old daughter in 2004.

In February 2004, Frederick Baer randomly selected Cory Clark, 26, after seeing her outside her home in Lapel, Indiana. He asked to use her phone to get inside of her house, then tried to rape her.

After Clark's 4-year-old daughter saw Baer kill slit her mother's throat, he chased the child into her bedroom, then killed her. After killing the two people, he took money from Clark's purse, then drove to his job at a construction site. He explained his absence by saying he had gotten lost.

Baer was convicted of murder, attempted rape and theft in 2004.

He was initially sentenced to death, but a three-judge panel from the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that he was entitled to a new penalty phase of his trial, meaning the case would go back to Madison Circuit Court for sentencing.

"Unnecessarily retrying even the penalty phase of a capital case is an extraordinary burden on a State and its citizens," Hill wrote in the petition to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.